The New Place of Reading: Locative Media and the Future of
Narrative

Abstract

Locative technologies hold out the promise to transform literary space in all of its
dimensions, including its represented spaces, reading interfaces, and the very spaces
within which literature is produced and consumed. Yet, despite the growing use of
location-based technologies, authors and readers alike have been slow to take to
site-specific narrative due to limitations inherent in both the current design of locative
media systems and our received notions of what constitutes the narrative experience.

This paper argues that new mobile reading platforms in general are altering conceptions
of literary space in highly conflicted ways, by radically expanding the sites where
narratives can be accessed and experienced even as they reinforce a residual notion of
literary reading as a sedentary and decontextualized experience. Locative media likewise
hold out the promise of increased mobility and contextual awareness, but confront several
cultural and technological factors preventing such an enhanced emplacement of narrative,
factors that current performance-oriented approaches cannot fully address. At the level of
cognitive engagement, the conditioned expectation of being
"transported" to a remote fictional world interferes with readers'
appreciation of the locative narrative's close ties to the real world, as well as the contextual
effects it elicits by means of transportation through the actual world. At the technical
level, the discontinuous algorithms of place that inform the architecture of most locative
media systems hinder the perception of narrative patterning and flow across more extensive
spaces.

Locative media thus operationalize the spatial tension between conventionally sedentary
modes of literary engagement and new modalities of mobility, a tension that is
constitutive of our present mediality. The study concludes with a discussion of StoryTrek,
a next-generation locative hypernarrative system designed to enable more complex, dynamic
and fluid modes of embodied narrative spatiality. By encouraging the user to actively form
complex narrative links between real and fictional spaces, StoryTrek enables utopian forms
of spatial play that neutralize both the spatial limitations of current locative media
design and the sedentary reading practices that continue to structure the experience of
digital literature.

The Changing Spaces of Reading

Prognostications about the future course of technology will inevitably seem quaint in
hindsight, but if the current convergence of handheld mobile devices, location-based
services and eBook readers continues, then the future of reading will be less a matter of
time than a matter of space. For well over a decade, artists and authors like Kate
Armstrong and Teri Rueb, interactive audio installations like Urban Tapestries, [murmur], textopia and 34 North 118 West, and alternate reality game designers such as Blast
Theory and 7scenes, have all successfully integrated locative media with narrative
experiences in ways that challenge our very definitions of the literary. As artistic
practice, locative media represent a productive hesitation between literary fiction,
documentary, audio-visual installation, and site-specific theatrical performance; as
cultural practices, they are located in the everyday sites of commerce and leisure within
both natural and built environments, at the crux of the user's public and private
identities. Site-specific digital literature is thus perfectly situated to engage large
audiences who already adopt locative media for other purposes, including the massive
global geocaching and alternate reality gaming communities, those who daily use
GPS-enabled applications for activism, flash mobs and other civil disturbances, and anyone
who uses new mobile location-based apps and services for shopping, wayfinding, tourism or
recreation. Add to this install base the millions of book lovers who are embracing the
explosion of popular mobile reading formats and platforms for eBooks and audio books, and
the potential audience for locative narrative seems vast indeed.

And yet, the growing use of location-based technologies in a wide variety of social
contexts has not produced a sizeable audience for locative media storytelling. Locative
narrative, like literary hypertext, remains an avant-garde and coterie practice, still
largely unknown as an artistic medium, let alone as a popular fictional genre. Authors and
readers alike have been slow to take to site-specific narrative due to limitations
inherent in both the current design of locative media systems and our received notions of
what constitutes a narrative experience. Even literary critics who take notice of locative
texts have tended to underplay the medium's affinities with conventional literary
narrative and apparently natural precedents such as epic poetry or the literature of
place, choosing instead to trace the evolution of locative media from modes of cultural
engagement having no necessary narrative content, such as games, psychogeographical
"situations" or site-specific theatre. Locative theorists have
de-emphasized the medium's narrative dimension while attending to its lyrical,
archaeological and, most significantly, performative dimensions. For example, both Chris
Eaket [Eaket 2008] and Rita Raley have rightly argued that locative media,
like cybertexts generally, demand heightened degrees of performativity from their users,
whom Raley describes less as readers than as embodied, multimodal "participants": "critical engagement [with mobile
narrative] requires a range of cognitive and bodily activities, only one of which is
reading in the sense of the visual processing of linguistic signs. That is, reading in
the physical environment particular to mobile media quite often also involves seeing,
moving, listening, touching. Participating in a mobile narrative is then precisely
that — physical participation that is also understandable as performance"
[Raley 2010, 303]. Raley's description perfectly captures the
total environmental involvement demanded by many locative artworks, and also suggests an
explanation for their lack of popularity, since literary enthusiasts are still more likely
to approach reading as a sedentary mental activity at odds with the modes of embodied
interactivity popular among gamers and geocachers. As empirical studies of hypertext users
have shown ([Miall & Dobson 2001]; [Pope 2006]), not everyone wants to
be forced to perform their own stories.

Performance-oriented approaches can account for the uniquely embodied interactivity of
locative media, but do less to account for the conventional features of printed literature
which they retain, including a primarily textual emphasis; a narrative arc; a reliance on
novelistic discourse, focalization and identification; and, most significantly for the
present discussion, the experience of being "transported" to a
fictional world, a phenomenon that occurs only in narrative media [Green et al. 2004, 313–4]. Understood as the cognitive and emotional process
by which readers become absorbed into fictional worlds, transportation has
been empirically demonstrated to operate through a complex blend of effects that depend on
a reader's attention, awareness, identification and affect, but is usually explained by
analogy to physical travel. In order to be transported to a fictional world, it is said
that a reader first has to leave the real world behind: "At the
core of the metaphor of being transported lie readers' subjective reports of having
left the real world behind when visiting narrative worlds"
[Gerrig 1993, 157]. Young readers are trained from an early age
to inhabit printed fictions as spaces framed off from the real world, and to focus
attention on these represented spaces while detuning their real-world contexts of reading.
Even literary critics rarely attend to the relation between the settings and chronotopes
(or time-spaces) represented within narratives, and those actual spaces in which readers
are themselves situated.

Because the metaphorical departure is experientially real, narrative transportation can
interfere with the new mobility enabled by digital reading devices. The reader of a
printed text might have to leave the real world behind in order to be transported to a
fictional world, thereby "los[ing] access to . . . the world of
origin"
[Green 2004, 248]; but with locative narrative quite the
opposite is true, as being transported to the fictional world is literally dependent on
transportation through the real world. This study argues that locative media hold out the
promise of an enhanced mobility and situational awareness, but fail to overcome the
expectation of conventional narrative transportation that continues to structure narrative
worlds as spatially contained and isolated from the real world. The readerly detachment
experienced at the level of cognitive engagement is reinforced at the technical level by
the discontinuous algorithms of place that inform the current design and implementation of
most locative media systems, and which prevent users from narrativizing their physical
environments. Far from representing "a challenge to the hegemony
of words"
[Raley 2010, 303], then, locative narratives mobilize printed
literature's traditional mode of decontextualized engagement within new spatial contexts
in ways that often interfere with the performance of place, foregrounding the productive
tension between the traditional experience of fictional transportation and new modalities
of mobility that constitutes our present medial condition. I conclude by describing
StoryTrek, an innovative system for the authoring and reading of location-based narratives
designed to elicit controlled artistic effects from the spatial tension between
conventionally sedentary modes of literary engagement and more dynamic, continuous and
complex models of spatial interaction. By putting both conventional literary
transportation and new locative mobilities into play, StoryTrek neutralizes the tension
between them, and opens a space for newly emergent narrative media.

The Contexts of Mobile "Reading"

Although the mobile revolution certainly provides the broader context for
locative media [Raley 2010, 301], neither the increasing familiarity of
location-based services and mobile applications nor the growing popularity of reading apps
for mobile devices have done much to enhance the popularity of locative storytelling. In
fact, new eBook and audio book formats remediate reading habits and assumptions associated
with printed literature that prevent a broader recognition of the literary potential of
locative media. New eBook and audio book platforms are altering conceptions of literary
space in highly conflicted ways, by radically expanding the sites where narratives can be
accessed and experienced, even as they reinforce a residual notion of literary reading as
a sedentary experience that "transports" the reader to a fictionalized
space removed from the actual world. The case of audio books helps to demonstrate why new
mobile reading platforms have done little to promote the wider adoption of locative
narratives. The comparison is informative, as the majority of successfully implemented
locative narratives to date have used portable audio devices tied to GPS receivers to
trigger playback of pre-recorded story segments as the user approaches certain geospatial
coordinates. This technical modality, which tends less toward literacy than a "second orality"
[Ong 2002], has encouraged the emphasis on performativity in critical
approaches to the locative.

An audio delivery format allows users of locative media to safely navigate the physical environment while
building upon their personal engagements with popular mobile audio listening technologies.
Portable audio books, including recordings of literary recitations as well as eBook
devices that support mp3 format or text-to-speech, are enabling a culture of ubiquitous
mobile (if not location-aware) "reading." Many now listen to audio
books while walking, driving, mowing the lawn, or performing other activities not
traditionally associated with reading. In a study of the effect of portable mp3 players on
how people listen to music, Michael Bull characterizes the iPod as a device that enables
the "accompanied solitude" of the individual listening
experience combined with social proximity, providing listeners with "an intoxicating mixture of music, proximity and privacy whilst on the
move"
[Bull 2005, 343, 344]. He stresses that the same portable
technologies that bind users to consumer culture also provide a background accompaniment
to the "personalised narratives" they create while moving
through their daily lives in order to aestheticize and bring sense to the unpredictable
and chaotic urban environment, "spaces of freedom" within the
culture of capitalism that help to manage individuals' utopian hopes and desires [Bull 2005, 351, 346–7]. Bull describes this activity as largely
non-interactive, since the iPod enables a user to become absorbed in self-created
narratives while detuning one's immediate surroundings, so that the "disjunction between the interior world of control and the external one
of contingency and conflict becomes suspended"
[Bull 2005, 353]. In this way, new recording and playback media
are changing not only the customary spaces of listening, but the entire auditory
experience.

If listening to music while strolling through the city allows individuals to
reorder the contingency of the streets, the immersive attention and cognitive overhead
required to follow and become lost in a previously scripted narrative are likely to
preclude the creation of the sort of personalized narratives that Bull describes. Audio
books likewise absorb the user into an alternate space, but it is a represented space that
is less easily connected to the auditor's external environment. They offer a more complete
detachment from capitalized urban space than that which Bull observes among music
listeners, encouraging an even deeper withdrawal from communal space into a private
literary realm.

In her pioneering study of audio books, Deborah Philips emphasizes that although iPods
and similar devices allow literary texts to be experienced in the company of others,
"[t]he literary culture that has been harnessed by that market
remains strikingly unchanged by the technology. . . . [W]ithin the world of the audio
book, the stratifications of high- and lowbrow, the 'classic' and
'popular' fiction remain stable," preventing a broader
democratization of literary culture [Philips 2007, 299, 303]. Audio
books have failed to produce new literary genres that exploit the dynamic, interactive,
multiplayer and performative features that are so integral to the experience of hypertext
literature, videogames and social media: "The websites and
marketing materials for audio books make very little of the ways in which an audio
book is a different commodity from a printed text"
[Philips 2007, 300]. Whereas the downloadable mp3 track has
changed not only listening conditions but also music production, fragmenting the album format
for easier download and optimizing the musical composition itself for smaller headphones,
the vast majority of audio books exist as spoken versions of printed texts — perhaps
abridged, but otherwise unaltered in their linear structure, content and
interactivity.[1]

Locating the eBook

It is not surprising, then, that the coming of the eBook should be compared to the mobile
audio revolution of recent decades: Amazon's Kindle eBook reader was hailed upon its
arrival as "the iPod of books"
[Pressman 2007], while recent months have brought widespread
speculation about whether Apple's iPad will transform the book publishing industry in the
same way the iPod revolutionized the music industry #evans2010. As
with audio books, the mass appeal of eBooks is predicated precisely on their portability
and ease of reading on the bus, the beach, in the coffee shop or in bed (even if their
expense still makes reading in the bathtub a risky undertaking). As consumer technologies,
eBooks are positioned within the general shift towards mobility, promising increased
access to literary texts worldwide while making large personal libraries portable for
ubiquitous access. The Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook and iRex DR800SG e-readers all
allow users to purchase and download books from anywhere with cellular reception, greatly
multiplying the sites of literary distribution. Amazon expressly markets its Kindle reader
as a device for collapsing distance: "Our vision for Kindle is to
have every book ever printed, in every language, available in 60 seconds from anywhere
on earth"
[Amazon.com]. At the same time, its portability promises to increase
the user's mobility: "You can send your documents directly to
your Kindle and read them anytime, anywhere "
[Amazon.com]. This
expanded mobility reflects the demands of an increasingly flexible and globalized
"creative economy," in which spaces of production and consumption
blur, and both work and leisure become increasingly subject to time- and space-shifting.
The very name of Amazon's new eBook reader software for Windows, Kindle Everywhere, cloaks
the corporate goal of total market penetration in the usability ideals of ubiquity,
interoperability and democratic access.

While eBook devices are already affecting production methods and distribution channels,
there is less evidence of radical change in how literature is consumed. eBook readers
arguably lend literature an expanded mobility, increasing the range and density of textual
dissemination and reception, but do not fundamentally change how readers relate to and
interact with these newly expanded sites of reading at the associative or cognitive
levels. Even as they embrace digital media's portability and ease of dissemination, current eBook
hardware and software are radically altering literary space at the levels of access and
storage, while attempting to remediate the relative permanence and stability of
conventional printed literature at the level of interface, content and experience. eBook
readers are currently designed and marketed to remediate the form, scale and experience of
a printed novel as closely as possible. These eBook readers take extraordinary measures to
approximate the look and feel of a printed book. The Bookeen Cybook, for instance,
features a wifi-enabled, grayscale e-ink display in a pocketbook format, bound together in
a genuine artificial leatherette binding designed to emulate "the
look and feel of tree flakes encased in dead cow"
[Mitchell 1996, 56]. The iRex iLiad uses a metal bar to emulate
the action of turning a physical page (moreover, you have to think of it this way to turn
the page in the right direction, as clicking forward will by default move the story
backwards). Even the Stanza iPhone app features an elaborate visual and haptic simulation
of a turning page. Although implemented to enhance usability, these conventions inherited
from the print medium in fact constrain the user's notion of what reading ought to be. In
so doing, they hide the fact that reading in the digital age no longer need, or generally
does, look anything like the solitary, sedentary and immersive practice demanded by printed
books.

Megan Benton has traced this social obsession with the look and feel of the printed book
to the 1920s, showing how books became especially important in this period as signifiers of
cultural capital. At this time, she observes, there were two kinds of Americans: those who
valued books for their own sake, and those who treated them as "things," commodities to provide amusement or impress the neighbours, like a new
radio or automobile. In a growing commodity culture, spawned by new industrial methods and
advertising, editors, publishers and critics took notice of what some called "domestic bookaflage," the selection and presentation of books in
one's home so as to project the cultural persona that others would perceive [Benton 2000, 17–20]. However quaint such notions may seem today, the fact
is that Cybooks, Kobos and Kindles are all so much domestic bookaflage, updated for
digital consumers; only instead of acting as camouflage for a lack of literacy, eBook
devices disguise our contemporary hyperliteracy, our constant engagement with
reading and writing across new media and modalities in new spaces and social contexts. As
Katherine Hayles has shown, the idealized detachment and disembodiment of the literary
experience results from a long history involving social and legal definitions of literary
work and property. The kind of close, immersive reading that has come to define both
scholarly and casual engagements with "the literary" demands a
certain detachment from one's own immediate, embodied setting, and disconnection from the
world of commerce and mere "information"
[Hayles 2005, 143–7]. Current eBook readers are designed to
remediate this conventional experience of disconnection, encouraging transportation while
carefully curtailing the kinds of connectivity and situational awareness that characterize
other mobile devices.

eBooks do not change existing conceptions of literary space so much as they extend them
outside of traditional reading settings. Mobile devices have radically altered the sites
at which people read while not only continuing to ignore the user's context and situation
in the world, but promising to overcome it entirely through ubiquitous product
distribution. eBooks, like audio books, do not generally connect narratives to new
locations or change the spatial contexts of reading so much as they recreate this learned
sense of disconnection, encouraging mobile readers to decontextualize and "leave
behind" ever more real-world locations. Even when taken on the road,
narratives experienced on Kindles and iPods reproduce the sense of
"placelessness" demanded by immersive reading, setting them apart
from the growing number of mobile apps that use GPS or wifi to sense the user's location
in order to provide contextually specific and geographically relevant information. For
instance, LibraryThing's Local Books app for iPhone will find libraries, bookstores,
literary readings or book fairs near the user's current location; by contrast, neither the
eReader Pro, Stanza nor iBooks reading apps offer any locative awareness, all tending
instead to enable conventional immersive reading in ways that obviate the effects of
locality. Ignoring one's immediate context while engaging in immersive reading allows a
reading subject to ignore his ephemeral, quotidian or grossly material
historical and geographical situation, while attending instead to supposedly
"timeless" literary knowledge and values. Gutenberg elegists may
bemoan the rise of "distracted" modes of reading encouraged by online
news sources, blogs, twitter feeds and other social media, but eBooks still await the
"casual" revolution that will liberate them from the constraints of
literary transportation, and reconnect them to the world of information.[2]

The Place of Reading and the Reading of Place

Locative narratives provide precisely the interactive and performative element that is
currently missing from eBooks and audio books, which may explain why they have not gained
a wider appreciation. To begin with, most locative narratives must be experienced
in situ, running directly counter to the
model of mass dissemination that governs both printed literature and eBooks. Of course, it
is precisely this site-specificity and contextual awareness that give locative narrative
the potential to utterly transform our understanding of literary space. As Jeremy Hight
puts it, locative media allow us "to move narrative from the
printed page and literary journals to alternate spaces and new possibilities of
dissemination, audience and community. Publication now can be signal, air, a spot of
land. It can be on maps, and it can be only transcribed by a person as they move. . .
. 'Place' is semantically read more as a point, a specific
designation or end point, while 'space' is read more as an open
area, place of storage, an area to be filled . . . ."
[Hight 2010, 322]. While Hight evokes the expanded catalogue of
narrative locations enabled by locative media, his distinction between isolated
"places" and extensive "spaces" only emphasizes
what I argue to be the locative's most serious technical limitation. Most locative systems
function only within specified locales, and are furthermore designed to respond to
relatively isolated geospatial coordinates. Anne Galloway rightly warns that it is
"impossible to reduce locative media to discrete (or stable)
objects of computation, or to singular representations"
[Galloway 2010, 30]; nevertheless, it is fair to say that most
locative apps and artworks alike remain technically limited to a punctuated model of
spatial interaction. Locative systems typically provide set feedback at specific
coordinates on the model of geospatial tagging, leaving the user to infer the spatial and
narrative connections between isolated points of interest (POIs), a design model they
share with the commercial navigation systems that guide users to their destinations
through turn-by-turn directions by way of rest stops and service stations. By breaking
down our subjective experience into easily commodifiable atoms of time-space, and
positioning us in relation to local sites of commerce and exchange as tokens of our medial
progress, such devices allegorize our contemporary obsession with the here-and-now, and
our inability to perceive any socio-political organization beyond capitalism.

Likewise, most locative narratives function by connecting discrete narrative moments to
specific points on the grid, such that audio clips or text lexia are activated whenever a
user reaches a particular location. The system knows where the user is at any given
moment, but does not understand how she got there, or the implications of her particular
path, approach, or style of navigation. Such works tend to privilege the node over the
edge and site over duration, presenting not a story so much as a tour of disconnected
sites.[3] While users will inevitably perceive connections
between the narrative segments triggered at distinct waypoints, such locative systems do
little algorithmically to encourage either their authors or readers to make these
schematic connections more explicit. They are incapable of responding to more complex
patterns in the user's physical context, ever-changing style of motion, or embodied
interactions with the environment. Just as reading practices inherited from print literacy
continue to encourage readers to disconnect the fictional narratives they read from their
actual spatial environments, so design conceptions borrowed from navigational and
location-based services limit the interactivity, responsiveness and spatial awareness of
locative narratives.

This situation is beginning to change, with locative works like InterUrban
[Spellman & Knowlton 2004], URBAN ENCOUNTER
[Giles et al. 2009] and The Interpretive Engine for Various
Places on Earth
[Knowlton et al.] offering a narrative experience that taps into the dynamic,
context-specific and communal sensibility enabled by new networked media. In the same
spirit, we have developed StoryTrek, a prototype authoring and reading tool for locative
hypernarrative that breaks out of the design specifications currently limiting
site-specific narrative. Our system represents a departure from the "waypoint and
graffiti" model of interaction offered by most locative and augmented reality
applications. Such applications know where you are at any given moment, and can provide
information about your immediate surroundings - the digital equivalent of a road sign or
memorial plaque - but have no idea how you got there or where you might go next.

Instead of linking geospatial points to static narrative segments, the StoryTrek
authorware enables the creation of spatial stories that respond in real time to the vector
of the user's physical movement and ever-changing geospatial context, providing narrative
patterns matched on-the-fly to the user’s location, route and style of navigation. The
authorware enables the creation of locative narratives, or storytreks, by
layering story patterns (inspired by Mark Bernstein's structural "patterns of hypertext"
#bernstein2003) over Google maps, while the reading tool tracks
the user's physical movement through these areas, matching her motion pattern with any
number of relevant story patterns. Users navigate our system simply by walking through an
urban or natural environment with a GPS-enabled mobile device in hand, while the story
follows along, tacking and turning in response to the reader's unstructured motion. With
conventional hypertext narratives, readers can to some extent direct the path of the story
by choosing from a series of in-text hyperlinks, although numerous theorists have
questioned the degree to which the reader is actually freed to choose his own path, rather
than merely choosing from among multiple rails laid down by the author. StoryTrek frees
readers from the confines of the link, setting them loose to follow any path
in the world while the story tags alongside, transforming the act of linking into an even
more eventful, agential and contextualized process.

For our initial test implementation, Pippin Barr of the IT University of Copenhagen
created Crisis 22, a suspense/horror narrative that focuses
on a character's repeated experience of a traumatic event enacted through space, in homage
to Michael Joyce's afternoon: a story
[Barr 2008]. This surreal love story documents the inner turmoil and regrets
of a solitary narrator as he wanders through a landscape that appears realistic and
allegorical by turns. As you move forward through the streets, the system returns a
present-tense narrative of walking through a city toward a rendezvous. Turning around and
backtracking in this particular storytrek fills in the protagonist’s back-story, while
turning away from a straight path yields digressive actions taking place around him.
Pause, and the system knows that you are lingering, and triggers an interior monologue.
Wherever you decide to go, the system presents a coherent but dynamically changing
narrative cued to your relative location and movement. The narrative experience arises
from the interactions of the story's internal logic with the reader's immediate physical
environment and activity over time.

Crisis 22 was built atop a Google map of Carleton University
in Ottawa, but its fictional and functional settings are ambiguous. Unlike other locative
systems tied to specific geospatial coordinates, our system is designed to respond to
narrative and navigational patterns, allowing stories produced and set in one particular
location to be experienced in any given place the user happens to be. This unique
locational layering feature allows specific locative narratives to be widely disseminated
and experienced by users in a variety of spatial contexts, greatly enhancing the medium's
mobility over "place-bound" approaches [Løvlie 2009]. It also multiplies the story's settings: the fictional setting
of the story, the implied geophysical setting for which it was originally produced, and
the specific user's physical context all interact to produce an entirely new kind of
narrative spatiality. In her survey of the various uses of maps in digital narrative,
Marie-Laure Ryan describes four different types of textual spaces upon which hypermedia
literature relies: the space of the textual world; the spatial architecture of the text;
the material space of the textual representation; and the spatial environments in which
the texts actually reside, be they in libraries or in databases [Ryan 2004].
These levels are not strictly hierarchical, and frequently overlap even in non-adaptive
hypertext narratives. They can also be further subdivided: for instance, the space of the
textual world combines the various spatial attributes of language with the conventions
governing narrative chronotopes, while the material space of the textual representation
comprises the spatial attributes of the interface along with the semiotics of iconography,
typography, spatial layout and page design. In practice, StoryTrek foregrounds the
interfaces and overlaps between all of these spatial levels, moving between questions of
how space gets into narrative and how narrative gets back into space.

StoryTrek has significant implications for the authoring and structuring of locative
media, for the concept of the link, and for the "worlding" effects of
digital narrative and games. The system repurposes readerly disorientation as the basis
for a richly contextual experience, transcoding the navigational barriers of conventional
hypertext (random jumps, drifting, backtracking, and so on) into a meaningful form of
input. This sense of embodiment and agency at times enhances the user's experience of
narrative immersion: after all, walking is a natural form of interactivity that tends not
to interfere with the user's immersion in the story world to the degree that interacting
with a mouse does. And yet, traveling with StoryTrek does not always make it easier to
become lost in a fictional world, as when reading a novel on a train; on the contrary, our
preliminary observations suggest that novel and unexpected effects occur as the user
"toggles" her attention between the storyworld and the real world.
Qualitative user tests reveal that when the represented space of the textual world corresponds closely to the
actual spatial environment of the text, it sometimes functions as a welcome navigational
aid that encourages narrative immersion and conventional transportation, while at other
times proving highly disorienting and disruptive to the immersive experience. The system
complicates and redefines spatial description, spatial deixis, focalization and
identification, processes that are not fully understood even where printed narratives are
concerned.

StoryTrek constantly raises tensions between real and represented spaces; for instance,
some users who wanted to emulate the spatial action of the story were prevented by busy
road traffic or impassable physical terrain. These users reported real anxiety and
frustration at this inability to enact the story bodily, one mark of the tension between
habitually sedentary reading habits and the emergent performativity of locative media. Our
system requires readers to abandon their decontextualized reading habits and develop new
strategies for linking real and textual spaces. Catherine Emmott has shown that readers
construct "mental representation[s]" of the "spatio-temporal context[s]" of narratives by combining general
knowledge of the world, in the form of "basic perceptual schema about
how the world works," with "text-derived" knowledge
[Emmott 1998, 177]. We have observed StoryTrek users drawing on
perceptual cues of their immediate environment as a third source of knowledge about the
story, using phenomenal data about the world around them to help fill the
"gaps" in the fictional world. Users have playfully identified
passers by with characters in the story, an imaginative repurposing of serendipitous
encounters that Bull also documents among iPod users [Bull 2005, 351].
We have witnessed StoryTrek users run away from invisible threats, join a group of
children at play when "instructed" to do so by the text, and even dip a
toe in the nearby river to engage with the story while testing how responsive the system
is to her specific location and actions. These embodied performances add a new dimension
to the act of narrative linking, and present an alternative to the aesthetic of
fragmentation and montage characteristic of so many hypertext narratives.

Figure 3.

Sarah and Celine read Crisis 22.

Figure 4.

Celine tests the boundaries of StoryTrek.

From Spatial Play to Spatial Politics

This simple act of dipping one’s feet has far-reaching implications for digital
narrative. According to Ryan, readers of conventional narratives tend to operate through
"the principle of minimal departure": except where explicitly
told otherwise, readers will assume that that the fictional world closely resembles their
own world — that the fictional sky is blue and that humans need to eat and breathe [Ryan 1980]. StoryTrek readers tend to follow a different principle, attempting
to forge unusually close links between the real and fictional worlds, yet without
necessarily leading to either immersion or the one-to-one mapping characteristic of
conventional realism. Instead, meaning is created through the reader’s self-conscious
linking of different layers of space and context. If conventional transportation allows
readers to leave their "public self-consciousness behind"
[Green et al. 2004, 317], then storytreks encourage them to enact
their experiences of the narrative world publicly and self-consciously. In our user tests
so far, readers have gone out of their way to create interpretive links between the text
and the real world and to perform them publicly, binding their reading experiences to
those of a larger community of users. Green et al. assume that readers require a strict
boundary between the real and represented worlds in order to be transported, noting that
where situational factors affect narrative transportation at all, they primarily do so in
negative ways. Real-world distractions can call a reader back to the real world, just as
negative environmental factors may encourage a reader to escape to a fictional world [Green et al. 2004, 321]. Green et al. project that new media could enhance
transportation through interactivity, but only by allowing users "to
easily leave their physical and psychological realities behind and become fully immersed
as an active participant in the narrative of an alternate, 'virtual'
reality"
[Green et al. 2004, 323]. However, our experience with StoryTrek shows how
real-world factors might well produce an enhanced form of transportation that allows
readers to keep one foot in the real world (if not always in the river).

Janet Murray has argued that in artistic representations, "[t]here is
a discomfort in not knowing the limits of the illusion," and that the experience
of immersion in a fictional world is maximized by the "combination of
tremendous immediacy with a clearly demarcated border," the "digital equivalent of the theater's fourth wall" that "will allow us to surrender to the enticements of the virtual environment"
[Murray 1997, 120, 103]. StoryTrek denies such surrender to an
immersive aesthetic by constantly encouraging users to cross the border between the real
and represented setting, turning the discomfort of porous borders into a source of
transgressive pleasure. These potentially disruptive effects raise several key design
issues surrounding the spatial experience of hypertext narrative, including user
(dis)orientation, navigational aids, and the relationship between cognitive, textual and
virtual maps; at the same time, they can encourage the development of critical
perspectives regarding the user's spatial situation within a global context. Whitson et
al. have described the shift by some videogame producers away from the traditionally
immersive first-person shooter perspective (which is closer to the experience of literary
transportation than some dare to admit) [Whitson et al. 2008]. In order to
encourage social gaming, "neo-immersive" games like those produced for
the Wii use a combination of gestural computing and group
play to emphasize the embodied nature and social context of digital gaming. Such games
encourage users to divide their attention between immersion in the represented game world
and interactivity with other players in the real world in a way that enriches both
experiences and enables critical self-reflection. StoryTrek brings this neo-immersive
aesthetic to literary narrative, using locative awareness to disrupt the reader's
immersion in the story and enable a newly situated critical awareness.

The urge to transform one's decontextualized reading into a publically performed
interpretation suggests the storytrek's potential as a political and utopian art form,
which ultimately may have less to do with the unfolding of time than a creative
interaction with space. From its very inception, the utopian genre was less a blueprint
for the perfect society than a rhetorical structure or toolkit for playing with and
reconfiguring social space. As Louis Marin has famously shown, Thomas More's "minutely detailed description . . . of the [Utopian] city's space"
reveals many "blind spots and empty spaces . . . . the political
places [of Renaissance society] that have been erased from the map"
[Marin 1984, 131]. Utopia
describes a shifting, indeterminate space in which several competing residual social
structures (monasticism, feudalism, communism) overlap, effectively cancelling out or
"neutralizing" one another, and thereby clearing a space for
new social formations that could not yet be fully articulated in More's day.

StoryTrek enables a similar utopian "spatial play" by
permitting the reader to participate in an ergodic "point-by-point
negation or canceling" of her lived social context [Marin 1984, 85], thus opening up real space to imaginary alternatives. Whereas
printed utopias achieve such spatial play discursively and rhetorically, StoryTrek invites
the user to enact utopian negations through a "procedural
rhetoric"
[Bogost 2007] that takes full-body motion as input. Readers stroll,
run, leap and zigzag across their physical terrain, activating fictional worlds through
their mobile devices. As is characteristic of utopian spatial play in general, these
fictional worlds do not replace the real world outright with fully formed utopian
alternatives, but rather engage reality in a dialectic, neutralizing it point-by-point to
prepare the ground on which new social configurations might emerge. At the same time,
StoryTrek neutralizes the sedentary reading practices that continue to structure the
experience of digital literature: the labour of reading can no longer be described as a
purely leisurely activity, but instead becomes a profoundly social act in which the reader
actively and publicly forms interpretive links between her fictional and actual
contexts.

While the StoryTrek authorware does not dictate the themes or content of the spatial
narratives that users create, its emphasis on mapping and mobility encourages critical
reflection on socio-cultural borders, the politics of space and travel, uneven global
development, and the migration of populations, or what David Harvey calls the utopian
"spaces of hope" that mediate between individual bodies,
collective identities and global processes [Harvey 2000, 49]. We are
currently hoping to exploit the system's potential for location-aware utopian spatial play
through several ongoing projects that open rifts in space within which to imagine social
alternatives. One such initiative involves the creation of an "archival atlas" of New World utopias that maps historical fictions, photos,
plans, blueprints and visionary descriptions of urban spaces onto actual geospatial sites.
By turning national archives inside-out, liberating these forgotten and dispersed literary
traces from their storage boxes, we hope to infuse geographical sites with historical
context - in particular, the indigenous, immigrant, environmental, and other
"minor" histories effaced by imperialism and the project of
modernity. We are using the city streets themselves as a dialectical
interface that layers residual social structures onto emergent configurations,
and links historical images and accounts of social migration, upheaval and urban renewal
to more recent cartographies of uprise. If locative media "involve persistent tensions between pasts, presents, and futures that make certain
identities and objectives possible or probable, and others impossible or
improbable"
[Galloway 2010, 32], then they also present the opportunity to
contour those possibilities toward social progress.

Other storytreks likewise engage the user in ludic explorations of emplaced social
alternatives. Valerie Bherer, Cindy Ma and Elise Vist used StoryTrek to create Isolation U., an Alternate Reality Game in which you play a
zombified undergrad at a post-apocalyptic campus, trying to survive the fast-spreading
conformity virus. The game bears some similarities with ZombieTruth.com and Zwatch.org,
collaborative alternate reality games that write an imaginary zombie virus (H1Z1) into the
fabric of official government pandemic websites, in a viral exploit that piggybacks an
alternate reality onto actual biopolitical databases. However, the embodied and locative
dimensions of Isolation U. set it apart: the game uses
motion-awareness to enact a physical quest that explores ideas of individual and
collective agency through the symbolic landscape of the campus. As the user explores the
campus, a story unfolds through the StoryTrek reader from the perspective of a newly
arrived student who only wants to meet people and fit in. This fictional avatar's
descriptions of the near-future campus, in which a private corporation has replaced all
vestiges of traditional academic governance structures, are mapped onto the user's own
perceptions of the actual campus. Walking into particular areas of campus will activate
fictional advertisements for commercial products and services, or trigger encounters with
corporate executives and groups of students happily consuming the recommended commodities;
exploring other areas will lead to run-ins with student radicals, non-player characters
who will try to convince your avatar that the university is brainwashing students through
a zombie virus that compels conformity in purchasing habits. Although based on the history
and geography of our own university, the game will work anywhere with functional GPS
access, encouraging users to recreate the actual campus through spatial play, replacing
the familiar spaces in which they live and work with contextualized, hypothetical and
experiential alternatives [Greenspan 2011]. Isolation
U. thus forces reflection on how private interests are colonizing public spaces
of learning by targeting students at the very sites in which they work and play. At the
same time, the game's kinetic algorithms allow users to repurpose the socio-technical
networks through which capitalism and locative media alike operate, and to
"win" actual geophysical space back from corporate sponsors in order
to unlock the school’s mystery.

Salaam Copenhagen, currently in development by Rilla Khaled
and Pippin Barr, is based in the daily experience of immigrants living in Nørrebro, the
largest Muslim quarter of Copenhagen. It integrates a number of narrative strands, each
presenting the perspective of a particular Muslim character or avatar associated with a
certain street. The user's varying movements through the streets yield different
storylines that reflect the character's interactions and struggles with mainstream Danish
culture, some positive, others less so. The narrative's primary goal is to help young
Danish users identify with and understand the specific challenges faced by the local
Muslim population, in the most embodied way possible [Khaled & Barr 2010]. We
anticipate that the added agency afforded by the StoryTrek interface will make the social
barriers that face the user's avatars all the more poignant. We are also planning to test
this storytrek with users in other cities far removed from its fictional setting, to see
how well its intercultural insights travel to other socio-political contexts.

These narratives all demonstrate how we might give narrative direction to locative media
and location-based services, instead of just taking directions from them. Galloway
argues that we need to look squarely at the present of locative media in order to assess
how predictions about its future can create "alliances and
obligations" that realize certain paths of development while precluding other
visions [Galloway 2010, 34]. StoryTrek narratives allow readers to
apprehend their location within cultural, political and technical alliances, and to forge
pathways toward new kinds of community. While it is unlikely that such locative narratives
will soon replace eBooks and audio books or alter decontextualized reading practices, they
do point the way out of the locative's emphasis on the here-and-now, and toward more
embodied, dynamic, collective and multiply contextualized applications.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the StoryTrek design team, Pippin Barr, Robert Biddle, Chris Eaket and
Rilla Khaled, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for
their generous support of our research.

Notes

[1]Although interesting advances have been made with interactive
audiobooks [Röber et al. 2006], there are also signs that mobile technologies are
starting to explore new conceptions of the literary. For instance, Electric Literature, a bi-monthly literary anthology billed as the first
literary app for iPhone, features animated trailers for stories as well as Single
Sentence Animations, a mode of cinematic ekphrasis in which artists interpret a single
sentence from a featured author's text; and Simon & Schuster has issued
similarly "enhanced" ebooks for the iPad that embed scalable video
within the text. eBook publishers have yet to explore the locative dimension,
however.

[2]Of course,
reading is never actually a "placeless" phenomenon. New research into
the cultural geographies of specific reading locales offers some evidence that the
supposed "placelessness" of reading may depend upon its exact
opposite: that is, privileged access to specific sites of reading as well as the leisure
time in which to visit those sites. For example, in her study of the reading habits of
young adults in a rural Canadian community, Paulette Rothbauer shows that for rural
youth with no access to sites of reading or clear articulations to a local print
culture, reading is literally a placeless activity that occurs outside of any reading
community.

[3]This limitation perhaps explains the technical and conceptual reliance of
rich locative narrative works such as 34N113W, John Klima's Saint Joe or Teri Rueb's
TRACE on linear modes of transportation (be it subways, trains or hiking trails) for
narrative constraint.

Greenspan 2011
"A Brain is a
Terrible Thing to Waste: Isolation U. and the Campus Zombie", forthcoming in
Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, eds.Generation Zombie:Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture. Jefferson, NC.: McFarland Press, 2011.